Is Your SharePoint Healthy?

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There is no better way to find out if your SharePoint portal is healthy than to analyze its users’ buy-in. If the users are satisfied, it means the portal successfully fulfills its goals. Still, even a portal developed according to all the requirements fails to gain users’ adoption. This is an alerting sign, as users’ discontent can result in rejecting the system.

In order to avoid such a regrettable final, the reaction should be very quick. And SharePoint performance is a number-one aspect to question.

Poor SharePoint Performance

When actively used, a SharePoint environment grows fast and the volume of data increases constantly. Though a positive trend, it can lead to unexpected SharePoint performance problems (e.g. slowly loading pages, media files and documents that don’t open, search that gives irrelevant results). A bad performance is both what users notice very quickly and what decreases their productivity right away.

Performance problems are usually caused by deployment mistakes or inappropriate system customization. Among the most frequent problems that impact negatively on SharePoint performance are large amounts of unstructured data, storage bottlenecks, lack of the server memory, etc.

So it’s either in-house system administrators or outsourced consultants who have to pinpoint the problems and troubleshoot them promptly in order to prevent the subsequent users’ reluctance.

SharePoint is not Used to Its Full Potential

If performance issues are fixed but the portal still doesn’t operate to its full capacity, it’s time to consider the system’s potential problem.

Users can choose a partial functionality if they don’t need all of the system’s capabilities. It’s worse if the system’s features are left aside while they are vital. A SharePoint portal that doesn’t comply with a company’s needs can’t complete its objectives and can hardly gain users’ sympathy.

To help your portal show its potential, the existing SharePoint functionality has to be analyzed and improved, then the missing functionality should be developed or customized according to the company’s business processes. The integration issue is to be considered as well (e.g. integration of SharePoint and CRM) in order to improve the systems’ and users’ interaction.

Unsecure SharePoint Environment

Security problems can be unseen by end users but cause system administrators’ headache. Security troubles can emerge because of the improper configuration of anonymous/unauthorized access rights and permissions, which leads to the system’s vulnerability (data leaks, data tampering or even system contamination).

In order to prevent unauthorized actions from users, access rights should be granted strictly according to internal security policies and employees’ roles. SharePoint security is also to be discussed at personal trainings, in order to explain users how to work correctly with data. This will help to guard every part of the portal, exclude security breaches and enhance the general system’s protection.

Complex Approach to SharePoint Treatment

When it comes to treating a SharePoint portal to overcome performance problems or improve its functionality, the portal’s owners usually prefer approach the issue locally. It means that they identify only a particular problem and try to eliminate it without analyzing the details.

However, the local approach rarely helps to improve the situation as several problems often go together (e.g. you fix a performance trouble but don’t notice a security breach, which results in extra time and investments in the future). Moreover, such an approach leads to extra investment into the system’s support: the more requests you have, the more support services you need.

Relying on our 6+ year expertise in SharePoint consulting, we can say that a complex approach is always more effective to prevent serious SharePoint troubles. To make a wraparound analysis of the SharePoint environment, our SharePoint developers recommend to apply a SharePoint health check methodology that allows to identify all the vulnerabilities that affect SharePoint performance, as well as to pinpoint SharePoint features that need to be developed for the system’s better productivity.

Conclusion

SharePoint health ensures not only the correct operation of the system, but also users’ buy-in. SharePoint problems instantly affect users’ behavior, so an immediate help should be provided to your portal in order to minimize the risk of rejection. A complete treatment cycle for your SharePoint portal is the best option, as it allows preventing multiple scattered actions, and thus saves the company’s time and budget as well as keeps employees satisfied.

By Sergei Golubenko, Team Lead and Solution Architect with 13+ years in software development, including 7+ years of working with Microsoft SharePoint.

Community Blast Provided and Sponsored by ScienceSoft. This information was provided by vendor for community education on product. No official review was performed by Vlad Catrinescu.

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